Fridge-less Living

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Dehydrated potatoes are found in packaged foods, selling for about $100 a pound. You can dry your own. Peel if you must, slice thin (1/8"), and steam-blanch for ten minutes or boil for five minutes—or a little less if they fall apart. I do it an easier way by heating the oven to 325°F and filling the racks with single layers of spuds. Cook for around an hour—till they are not quite soft enough to eat. Cool, slice thin, and let air dry on towels till the upper surface of each slice is dry enough not to glue itself to the screen. Then dry till crisp and bone-dry or they'll mold. Vacuum-pack in plastic pouches.

To prepare other vegetables for drying, follow the blanching times for freezing you'll find in any cookbook. To dry fruit—including squash, peppers, and tomatoes—you needn't blanch anything. Braid or string peppers on thread and hang from the roof on a sunny porch.

If seeds and juice are squeezed out, the rind of any tomato will dry, but only Italian paste-type plum-tomato varieties are worth the bother. Before you try it, buy some sun-dried tomatoes from a grocery and see if you really like them. Dry or packed in olive oil, they are much the same. They can be minced and boiled to death to make a spigot sauce, but are best left to add a chewy texture and rich flavor to stews and pasta sauce, or on pizza or in a pickle-vegetable salad. Another commodity that I'll leave to the pros is making tomato paste.

Grapes can be dried whole into raisins; other fruit should be sliced thin first. Just split and remove stones from apricots and plums. Pears and freestone peaches dry nicely if you get them before they become juicy-ripe, when they'll cement themselves to the screen. Firm fruit, such as pumpkins and storage apples, can be cored and cut in a spiral about ¼" thick by slicing from top to bottom, going around and around. Open the spiral and dry on a string through the center.

We dried bananas and pineapple as well when the kids were little; they concentrate sugars into a natural candy. I hear that you can dry citrus, kiwi fruit, mangos, papayas and the like, if you've got the weather for it.

Fruit leathers are Vitamixed fruit pulps set to dry on plastic or wax paper. Pureed fruit alone or mixes of fruit along with spices and anything else you'd put in a pie (except the thickening) make good leathers.

PICKLING

Pickling is a way of keeping decay organisms from harming cucumbers and many other fresh vegetables and fruits; soaking the produce in a brine of salt, or salt and vinegar (or other acid that's strong enough), kills these organisms. Too much salt in the diet isn't all that good for you and me even though your blood and mine has the same salt content as sea-water, whence we purportedly sprung eons ago, and even though severely salt-reduced diets have recently been shown to be equally harmful to some.

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